20 September 2009
Building 19
(Intrepid Historical Detective Negotiates the Mud of Building 19)
There are good days and bad, we all have them.
As bad as things get, I had to wince this morning. I do not believe I have experienced anything as surreal as North Carolina populist tort lawyer, Senator, and Presidential candidate John Edwards had. The New York Times this morning had an interesting story that would have gone well with eggs and toast and his wife of 32 years.
The copyrighted story said Mr. Edwards once had to calm his anxious mistress, one Ms Rielle Hunter, by “promising her that after his wife died, he would marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance by the Dave Matthews Band.”
I can just imagine trying to book them. So, this has got to be a better day than his, though it is tinged with a faint sepia of melancholy. This is the last day the pool is open, and there will be ritual mirth and merriment at the dying of the light.
Autumn comes officially on Tuesday, but today is the day that summer dies.
I swore I would wrap this up today, but of course that was a lie. There is a new beginning for this and still branches and eddies in the long history. It does actually all fit together.
I told you about how Maddy came to be standing on the lost graves of the Nazis last week, but that wasn’t the first time we made a run on them. I will get to that in a minute, since Building 19 at DC Village gets in the way.
On the other side of the fence, in the compound inhabited by the living, there was activity. Bulldozers were moving with some sort of purpose, eradicating the building that was the key to locating Potters Field.
With the building gone, it would be a simple enough matter to knock down the fences and move them around and the significance of this place where the nameless dead, black and white, would be gone forever.
We decided we needed to see what remained from the inside, and that is precisely what we did.
After scrambling back through the holes in the fences, we rearranged ourselves in a semblance of neatness. A few minutes later, there we were, in the thoroughly official-looking Bluesmobile, trunk bristling with antennae.
Maddy and the Colonel were back in stark business dress, and we all were leashed and badged as any proper Washingtonian is expected to be, with multiple checkpoints to pass in the course of a busy day.
We pulled up to the swinging white metal pole that blocked the entrance to DC Village.
It is time to explain what is going on, beyond the vines and scrub trees that have overgrown Potters Field. You need to understand the nature of the jackpot that is going to be paid out.
Everything starts with cash. So let’s follow the money, shall we?
The conventional estimate is that 7 percent of government spending is lost to waste, fraud or abuse. Don’t take my word for it; that sentence is from the New York Times. They were talking about the Stimulus package, and the small-scale bunko that goes along with the $150 billion that has been pumped out of the Treasury so far.
The Department of Homeland Security is going to spend $3.1 Billion on the refurbishment of the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Compound. It is going to be the biggest construction project in town since the Pentagon was thrown up in 1941.
At seven percent, that means something north of $220 million is going to get siphoned into something else.
Since we are talking about the District, seven percent is actually a wildly conservative number.
The folks who control the contract awards in the District are going to hit the jackpot. I could slow down and tell you stories of invisible employees, phantom buildings and the like, but the simple matter is that the overhead attendant to doing business here is intrinsic to the system.
They are trying to clean things up, and making some progress on draining the swamp that made the Nation’s capital an international embarrassment.
We have a long way to go, though. When I was still in the Government, I was summoned with my Boss to attend a meeting with a former Mayor, who bluntly explained a scheme by which federal money would be spread around to several groups of people in the name of unspecified good works.
My Boss wanted a witness, and nothing of the sort happened, but it went to show me how things work in Diamond City.
I do not dislike Marion Barry, the flamboyant former Mayor of the District, convicted felon, hero, rogue and continuing rascal. I like his unapologetic style, and the way he still carries himself.
The rules are for everyone else, and he is still the Councilman from Ward 8, because his constituents where all this money is going to be rolling around, licit and otherwise.
When he took over as the second elected Mayor of the city in 1979, around 3% of all contracts awarded went to small or minority-owned business. By the time he was done, the percentage had soared to nearly half, most of it with assorted overhead costs and kick-backs.
Marion Barry did not bring corruption to Washington, he just refined it.
J. Edgar Hoover was the subject of a marvelous documentary authored and produced by Bill Cran for the BBC. The 40-year FBI Director is remembered for his single-minded dedication to making Law Enforcement a professional occupation. In his dual reality, he was as crooked as the lowest Irish flat-foot on the beat. He was a consummate grifter who never paid for a lunch, gambled heavily with Mob, and had the Bureau furnish and update his residence.
As a former Congressional investigator said in the documentary, had Hoover lived a little longer he would have been indicted for corruption. Or more.
Only seven years after the Director was in his grave in Congressional Cemetery, Mayor Barry brought things to a whole new level in the city that Hoover had controlled with his de factor secret police.
Councilman Barry represents the last area in Washington with the potential for mass re-development. I mentioned the $3.1 billion that is going to go to redevelop the campus at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the new Homeland Security HQ.
Let’s say that graft takes only ten percent of that total- you can do the math yourself.
As to DC Village, word on the street is that 16 acres of the property is going to be sold to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Metro system for use as a modern bus garage and fueling center.
The old facility was in the wasteland at Half Street, near the Navy Yard, but that was razed to provide space for new luxury condominiums.
DC Village was on hard times, falling apart. Some of the old buildings were being used for jobs training programs, others were just falling down.
We conferred at the car, and decided the only thing we could do was do a survey on the property from the inside, just in case Potter’s Field turned into something else when no one was looking.
As we pulled up, we could see the barrier to the facility was in good shape, though, and so was the guard shack. We waited for a minute or more, but no one emerged to tend the gate.
I sighed and said I would go in and see if we could bluff our way past.
I walked as officiously as I could to the guard shack and stepped in.
“Hello,” I said, waving the green badge with the Federal Eagle on it.
A pleasant young woman, one of several in a faded blue official blouse looked up. “Hi, Sir, what are looking for?”
I almost blurted out that I was looking for hundreds of indigents and a handful of secret agents, but I said instead, “I’m here on official business. There is a building we have to look at.” I waved at the blue police car outside with the two official looking people in it.
“Building? Oh, you must mean Building 19. You one of them Contractors?”
“Yes Ma’am, I am, and that is the very building we are going to inspect.Building 19.”
“Oh, OK, you got to sign in on the sheet outside. Have a nice day.”
I thanked her profusely, and went out the door, and inexplicably used my true name on the log. What the hell. Someone has to be honest.
She was kind enough to follow me and raise the gate. Back in the driver’s seat of the Bluesmobile, we slowly advanced into the Village.
“There are a lot of disadvantaged youth in here. Must be the reason for all the security,” said Maddy as we drove slowly up Village Lane past knots of young people in identical blue shirts.
They seemed to be used to seeing slowly moving blue Crown Victorias. The buildings got seedier as we drove deeper in the village, and at the back of the property behind a maintenance yard we found a circular concrete pad that matched the satellite imagery we had seen. The building it served was recently gone, splinters of beams and bricks scattered across a scarred red-dirt field.
I jumped out as the rain came down from the gray sky, and the muddy ground sucked at my shoes. My suit was going to pay for this excursion, but I got the pictures I needed to document the event.
Up the hill, the perimeter fence that marks Potters Field is still intact. If you zoom in on the imagery, you can see a notch in the fence line. That holds a gate with an ancient chain and a stout lock. The Germans are just down the line, and slightly to the right on the slope. They are with several hundred other nameless ones.
We looked at what there was to see, and then scraped the mud off our shoes and climbed back in the car.
At the gate, a tall man in a suit asked me to open my trunk, to ensure that we were taking nothing away of value.
Being an old cruiser, there is a big button to pop the deck right in the middle of the dashboard, and I hit it with my index finger. The man looked at my cooler and spare tire, and waved us through.
Back on interstate, St. Elizabeth’s campus slid by on the right, with the presidential support compound on the old Naval air station to the left.
“They say the new bus facility is going to cost $481 million,” I said.
Maddy is a math whiz. “Let’s see,” she said, pursing her lips. “That amounts to around $48 million in walking around money.”
“I bet that field is asphalt the next time we see it,” said the Colonel from the back seat.
“I don’t know,” I said, swerving around a dump truck headed for the SW Freeway. “The people in Potter’s Field have probably been voting for generations. Maybe their elected representatives will take care of them.”
“Maybe,” said Maddy, looking out at the Barry Farms housing development. “But they better not let those Germans vote. Only Herbie Haupt was an American citizen.”
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com